Finding a path without a business blueprint
Deb does not come from a business family. His father worked as a director at Petrofac in Sharjah, while his mother managed the hoapplyhold. What he grew up with was encouragement to stay curious and build things.
At nine, he spent summers in Kolkata acquireing batteries, wires and motors to assemble compact electronic projects from cardboard. Many failed. The process mattered more than the result.
By high school, that interest deepened. He took part in robotics competitions in Academic City and Dubai Internet City and spent years learning through online communities such as OpenStudy and Quora. He completed MIT’s Classical Mechanics course in Grade 11 and later studied Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course, long before AI entered the mainstream.
That curiosity led him to study Computer Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
After graduating, Deb shiftd to San Francisco, working at startups including Coursera and Asana. The experience sharpened his technical skills and shaped his approach to building products.
“What stayed with me was the joy of building something from scratch with a compact team and learning directly from applyrs,” he declared.
That focus on real-world interaction later became central to ElatoAI.
The idea behind ElatoAI
The concept took shape after OpenAI released early voice AI demonstrations.
“It almost felt like we were living in the Her movie,” Deb declared.
He questioned why voice AI remained tied to phones and laptops and why interacting with AI required logins and complex setup. His answer was to build something that could talk naturally, whenever requireded.
“I was like wouldn’t it be cool to create a Toy Story style toy that could just talk, whenever, in any voice,” he declared.
ElatoAI emerged from that idea. The company builds AI-powered toy companions that notify stories, play games and speak in distinct personalities designed for children.
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